| 100 |
Christian Science Monitor
Iran's greatest filmmaker is fond of stripping personalities bare through conversations they have while riding in cars. Here he pushes his favorite dramatic device to its limit.
|
| 100 |
Salon.com
The ultimate lesson in less-is-more cinema, an intimate and revelatory character study as well as a brilliant, almost symphonic rendering of the distracted, anxious, half-alienated and half-meditative state in which we spend vast amounts of our lives.
|
| 100 |
San Francisco Chronicle
A minimalist film, Ten looks and feels like a documentary. At the end, there is no big denouement, but a profound realization that the people we see on camera are all aching for answers -- and struggling to come to terms with their lives.
|
| 100 |
Boston Globe
The new Abbas Kiarostami film is called Ten, and in it something amazing happens: nothing.
|
| 91 |
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
There's no doubt that Kiarostami is giving us a lesson in social politics, but the education lies in the mosaic pieced together from conversations and situations.
|
| 90 |
The Onion (A.V. Club)
Nobody handles unvarnished interactions quite the way Kiarostami does, and for much of Ten, it's a kind of austere thrill to watch him focus so intently on one aspect of his craft.
|
| 90 |
Washington Post
Kiarostami has been hailed as the premier humanist filmmaker at work in a larger Iranian cinematic renaissance, and all his formal signatures are on view here -- the small, intimate canvas, the loose, improvised air of the performances, the absence of an authoritarian directorial hand.
|
| 90 |
Variety
10 dazzling and perceptive snapshots of women with which femmes everywhere can identify.
|
| 90 |
The New York Times
A work of inspired simplicity.
|
| 90 |
LA Weekly
One of the year's finest movies, it's not quite the masterpiece that some of Kiarostami's cultists want it to be.
|
| 90 |
Washington Post
Shows us, in an extraordinarily simple way, the hopes and frustrations of one woman's life.
|
| 90 |
Village Voice
Conceptually rigorous, splendidly economical, and radically Bazinian.
|
| 90 |
Chicago Reader
The film offers a fascinating glimpse of the Iranian urban middle class, and though it eschews most of the pleasures of composition and landscape found in other Kiarostami films, it's never less than riveting.
|
| 88 |
Chicago Tribune
A film made by a master, with a simplicity that is really revolutionary. It's a work capable of changing the ways you look at the movies - and at life.
|
| 83 |
Entertainment Weekly
A glimpse into a society that has grown more open, more free, and also more casually selfish in its interpersonal aggression.
|
| 80 |
TV Guide
Inexpensively shot on digital video, it's an invaluable work of art.
|
| 80 |
Los Angeles Times
One of the best films to open so far this year, but greeting each new work from a favored director as if it were equally brilliant can't be good for anyone, the director included.
|
| 75 |
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
Ten may strain your patience but that's the high-stakes gamble of this provocative project.
|
| 75 |
New York Post
Breezy, entertaining and enlightening.
|
| 50 |
New York Daily News
The already minimalist filmmaker has gone positively threadbare with Ten, a movie that feels as if there was no director on the set. For the most part, there wasn't.
|
| 50 |
Chicago Sun-Times
The shame is that more accessible Iranian directors are being neglected in the overpraise of Kiarostami.
|
